


Goldfish Princess

by kiwilapple



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-10
Updated: 2014-03-01
Packaged: 2017-12-29 00:53:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/998920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiwilapple/pseuds/kiwilapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An heiress with a unique genetic disorder finds an educated but lesser-class young man. They hardly speak to one another, yet when he calls her Goldfish Princess, you can hear the love in his voice. Adapted from a oneshot manga by the same name. If you find it, can you contact me please? I've been looking everywhere.<br/>This work is also published on my FanFiction.net account under the same name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Iridescence

**Author's Note:**

> Woo, first post on the new account! It's fairly unedited, so if you find any glaring errors, could you send a message my way? Thanks, and enjoy.

A christmas festival in a small city is a strange thing. The harsh streets fill with heat and soft music, carolers on every corner asking for donations and everyone bundling up to avoid them. Christmas trees spraying the scent of pine and/or plastic across the saturated air to settle in the hair of onlooking children, harried parents, the lovestruck, and the lonely dreamers. Hot drinks were passed and spilled onto the pavement and pulled apologies after them into the puddle seeping into the cracks and the fabric. Celebrities became anonymous, the anonymous important.  
He wasn’t poor by any means, but if he’d known who she was when she bumped into him, startling him beyond a measure he hadn’t known he’d been keeping, it would have embarrassed him and disappointed her. Fortunately, he instead extended an arm so she wouldn’t fall, securing his hand against her back. She was so tiny.  
“I’m sorry!” Her voice trilled, almost chirped, and you would call her a bird but her face didn’t give you the impression. She was too compact, too real. Badly pinned hair fell in rivers and oceans around her, almost black and striking against a pink padded jacket. Except it wasn’t exactly pink. It was more a vibrant magenta. Fuschia. It matched the dainty plastic rimmed glasses pulled against her eyes. Those eyes were a bubbling blue, and he loved them.  
“Don’t… be sorry.” He was having a little trouble thinking of things to say. She kept looking at him with a face that said she was sorry, so sorry, and he couldn’t even think of something to make that better. But he did know he wanted to see her smile. “It’s fine, it was my fault.” It wasn’t, but it was all he could say. She beamed, mollified, and the expression melted his resolve again.  
“You aren’t hurt, right? You’re okay?” She could have broken his arm and he would still be okay.  
“I am fine. Are you alright?” She startled him by grabbing one of his hands in a pair of violet mittens, the wool pleasantly abrasive against his own night-black fingerless gloves.  
“I’m Feferi.” He opened his mouth to remind her that that didn’t answer his question, then stammered it shut, looking out over her head at the crowd.  
“…Equius.”  
“Equius… Hey. Let’s run away.” He snapped back to look at her.  
“What? That is absolutely ridiculous, we can’t possibly—“  
“We don’t have to run far. Just out of the crowd. I wanna see some stars.” Her eyes were shining, and despite his confidence in his own strength, he quickly found himself on the edge of activity, dragged by her into a side street. Intuition screamed that it was a bad idea, that he didn’t know her and this was stupid and reckless.  
But he remembered that his whole life he’d hardly done anything reckless or stupid. Raised by a man more butler than guardian, he wasn’t scolded or commanded. Feferi’s insistence woke something. He liked it.  
She took them right out of the city center to a children’s park. Before he knew what she was planning he found himself on top of the slide, secured behind painted green bars, following her finger up to the rivers and oceans of light an infinity above them.  
“They’re perfect.” He nodded dumbly, watching her watch the sky, moonlight and streetlamps speckling across the dark freckles across her cheekbones. He wanted to tel her she was perfect, but he hardly knew her; he couldn’t.  
“I love the stars,” she continued on without him, “it’s so hard to see them from my room, though. I’m really glad this park is still here.” He dared to set his hand on hers, hushing her and lacing their fingers together into the grated floor.  
“I understand.” Neither of them said anything after that for a long few minutes, slowing down the sped up encounter to a single split second where just their joined hands knew each other, a discarded mitten and a ragged glove inches away.  
She whispered something; he chuckled, then murmured a nervous reply. Her eyes lit up like they’d been dating for years and he’d just asked her to marry him. He almost loved her right then, but his heart sighed and pulled back and only let him hold her hand.  
Feferi took a deep breath, then sagged against his chest, pressing the top of her head under his chin. His eyes widened, but then Equius smiled and took his hand off of hers to wrap around her shoulder. He could feel her smile.  
The man almost didn’t notice when he kissed her. He didn’t remember the moment, only that he had started it and not her.  
She tasted like brine and felt like a flower. He didn’t know what kind, he’d always been a mechanics man. He supposed a rose, or a water lily. It didn’t matter. He was kissing a starlight and snow girl who filled the angles he’d hated with curves until they were melded, and he held her in both strong arms and sucking in a breath, and she pulled one in too. And they remembered that it was cold but they didn’t care. He pushed his hand into the mass of hair and tried not to crush her lips, but her fingers curled into his coat collar and destroyed his self control. He tasted her mouth, breathed the ocean scent and imagined a flower that smelled like her.  
He ruined it, grazed the nape of her neck with his fingertips. She flinched, broke away and reclaimed her dark lips.  
“I’m sorry,” he tried to apologize, and she gave him such a sad look, and confused, like she didn’t understand him. He leaned in and she sucked in her lips, so he just rested his forehead against hers. She slumped into his chest, trapped his guilty fingers with hers.  
He let her hide a moment, then used her hands to lift her face and kissed her one more time. Treacherous stranger he was, he slipped a hand free while she was distracted and cupped it against the back of her neck.  
Feferi jerked back, but it was too late. He was already looking, staring at his palm where a pair of cast off beetle wings, shiny in the tiny lights and so fragile, threatened to scatter in the wind. Except they weren’t beetle wings. They were fish scales.  
Equius opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off, voice tiny, upset. He hated that.  
“I have to go,” she whispered, then, quicker than thinking, which granted he hadn’t been doing much of anyway, she’d dropped herself over the edge and slid to the bottom into the barkdust. Equius lashed out a hand to catch her but she was gone, climbing out of the slide and starting to run.  
“Feferi!” What should he say? I’m sorry? What is that? What are you?  
“I love you.” She almost stopped, then did. He was leaning over the railing, watching her desperately, but she just shook her head a little. His heart was not too strong to break.  
He called after her again, but in the end he let her go. He sat there, holding one of his own hands in the other, the one with the iridescent scales.  
When he woke up the next morning with cold in his bones, he wondered if she was a mermaid.


	2. Tenebrous

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter took so long, I was in a big slump. I finally started getting motivated and inspired again, so I'm pumping out the words while it lasts. Hopefully the next chapter will be up soon.

Equius told no one of the girl Feferi. He didn’t really believe she existed. The scales had vanished with her sometime in the night. He’d probably lost them to the wind or put them away, but he couldn’t remember.  
There were whispers in the city air, not of his mermaid, but of business. The names Peixes and English and Crocker zipped in the air with the word “merger.” Why would a baking company merge with a weapons manufacturer and a tech R & D facility? It didn’t make sense to anyone, yet apparently all three companies had given their preliminary go-aheads. The streets were abuzz.  
Equius had been fussing with the underside of a leaky, staining 1995 VW Beetle for the last half hour. It refused to stop bleeding oil on him and the concrete no matter what he did. Then he needed to put the window back on the track and check the brakes. His coworkers were chatting more than helping, and it was rather… irksome.  
“I heard she’s debating letting her daughter take over after all.”  
“Yeah, her adopted sister’s getting the gig, right?”  
“Sucks for Feferi, missing out on the fortu-” Equius was out from the dark underbelly of the Beetle and jumping up into the face of the speaker in a second flat.  
“Did you say Feferi?” He blinked and nodded.  
Equius didn’t even realize he’d grabbed his coworker by the front of his blue cotton jumpsuit until the man’s boots struggled to hold the ground, suspended in Zahhak’s grip.  
“Do you know where she lives?” His dark eyes were wild, daring to hope that the mermaid in his dreams existed in this world. The mechanic dangling in his arms blinked. His coworker had always been calm, collected, not prone to outbursts even a quarter of this magnitude. The ponytailed man spent his days in quiet work and spoke in low mumbles. Now his sharp features opened into an expression none of the men there had ever witnessed before. He was… desperate.  
“Why? A girl?” His feet still hung an inch off the floor, but he managed a cheeky smile before bracing. But Equius Zahhak only set him gently on the floor, fingers loosening as his head dipped.  
“Yes.” The men looked at each other before each stepping in to lay a hand on a shoulder or back in support.  
“Bring her back, do you hear?” The speaker’s voice was soft, and Equius nodded, took a breath, and regained his old composure. He pulled carefully away from all the unfamiliar touches from familiar people and drew into the hard face he’d always carried. They didn’t speak again until the end of the shift, when the then ruffled, now back in order coworker handed over a folded paper. He just nodded and left, leaving the tall man in the scarf to stare through transition lenses at the paper in his suddenly shaky hand. The end of the scarf dipped to his forehead to mop up a sheen of nerve sweats.  
Suddenly his feet started to move forward, unconscious of the fear in his chest clenching around his warmed heart. It was crashing, constricted, against the bars of his ribs, crying out desperately to find her again and taste the flower of her lips that could only be called Feferi. That iridescent girl with bubbling blue eyes and a smile that forgave the world.  
But would that smile ever forgive him? One foot faltered and his hand shot out, gripping too tightly to a newspaper dispenser, and he glanced guiltily around as he regained his balance. He’d just have to hope. Just hope that she would forgive him. He would never, ever hurt her again.  
Again feet in heavy shoes moved forward, crushing puddles of half-melted snow under the soles. He glanced down at the paper clutched in his fingers. It wasn’t far. She wasn’t far. His heart beat harder against its bonds.  
Finally only the gate stood in his way, a million miles tall and golden. He faltered again and just stared. His princess lived here? Here, in this glorious palace of a home, all self indulgence and money? Surely not. Such a small girl, anxious to be under open sky and stars, could bear this imperial, oppressive place. He gaped. How would he ever find her now? Perhaps he could scale the wall, but if caught… And assuredly he would be caught, as he had no idea where in the mansion Feferi lived.  
Someone was walking along the other side of the gate. Not Feferi. He struggled to hide his lanky frame, and ended up awkwardly pressing against the brick pillar of the gate foundation. A pale, black haired girl with blue eyes and glasses walked past. Not Feferi. But she wasn’t a guard, either, and that was all Equius’s heart needed to bolden and force him from his meager hiding place.  
“Excuse me!” The volume of his voice startled both him and the girl, who yelped when he covered his mouth with a hand in embarrassment.  
“I apologize.” She just nodded and stared at him. “I’m looking for Feferi Peixes.” Suddenly her face opened up in recognition.  
“Oh… Oh my gosh, are you-? You have to be. Oh my gosh, okay, hold on a second.” She ran forward, her unruly short hair bobbing around her face. She smiled a little and fumbled with the latch on the gate. “My name is Jane. You have got to be Equius, right? She wouldn’t stop talking about you when she got home. She’s… totally grounded, but I’m not going to let that stop you two.”  
Equius just took the words in silently, in shock with the realization that this was real. He was going to see her again. Jane opened the gate and he stepped in, not even remembering the motion afterward. All his mind was capable of thinking was “Feferi. She’s taking me to Feferi, I’m going to see Feferi.” His heart lurched with fear, then resumed its feverish pounding in his chest.  
Leading him through the trees around the house, Jane continued to talk, but Equius had already pushed her from his mind in favor of the starlight girl.  
The far side of the complex loomed in darkness above the pair. Fat clawed fingers of ivy reached out from the stone, just missing the edge of Equius’s cheek as he pulled away from the overgrown tower. The urge to call to Rapunzel rose in his throat, but he choked it back and watched Jane nervously.  
He didn’t expect her to throw rocks at the window, like some love-drunk teen with boombox in hand, so when the bucktoothed girl threw out an arm, he flinched at the clatter the handful of stones made bouncing from pane to balcony.  
“Jane!” he hissed, but she just smirked, threw a good luck his way, and disappeared into the bushes. He could only stare up into her window and hope.

And there she was. First a dark silhouette against the light, and then her eyes framed in pink, searching the darkness. Equius raised a sheepish hand.  
“…Equius?” She stared, for too long, but then she beamed brilliantly and waved an arm down to him. His eyes caught the tube dangling from her wrist. Feferi followed his eyes and pulled the hand back.  
“You should come inside.”


	3. Evanesce

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BAM 'nother chapter. Hopefully I can pump out the last one too! It's the epilogue! Tune in for the last installment~

Being on a stone patio, when the glass doors finally opened he slipped inside and fluidly drew himself up the staircase on his left. It was obvious the entire area was designated to Feferi, but the sterile layout of the playthings and furniture betrayed how truly often she explored her own living quarters. Another soft knock at her door, followed by her “come in,” and he’d stepped into Feferi Peixes’s room for the first time.  
She was sitting on the side of her bed, hands folded in her lap and trying to block your view of the IV stand with her body. But of course it was impossible; he took in the entire setup of her room, split in two. Feferi’s Likes and Dislikes. The walls were a bright pink trimmed in gold, posters of cuttlefish and seacreatures coating the walls as if it were glass in an aquarium, surrounded on all sides. Glow in the dark star stickers clustered around her bed, trailing in swirls around her ceiling. The flat grey of the machines surrounding her bed by the far wall showed her Dislikes. She refused to look at them, or even at him, only at the dark carpeted floor. One hand played with the other, then started to toy with the IV in the back of her hand until Equius stepped forward and took her small hands in both of his.  
“I thought I’d dreamt you.” The words ached as they spilled from his mouth, and only moments passed before he’d folded her into his arms and tucked his face into the billowing mass of her dark hair. She clutched to him, fingernails digging into his back, but he loved it. He needed her close to him. And she him to her. They sat that way for a long moment, clinging to the other desperately to ensure that they indeed had existed, and then finally Feferi sat up, her small hands draping across his arm. He leaned his cheek against one as he watched her.  
“No one’s supposed to know about the scales.” She sighed and pulled her hands away to move her curls aside, and turned to expose her neck. A thick patch of shimmering scales lay against the skin, tapering to a thin line between her shoulderblades and then under the neck of her nightdress. He reached but didn’t touch until she leaned in, but his fingers hesitated as they swiped. She’d bitten her lip, and he froze in worry he’d hurt her. “It doesn’t hurt,” she whispered, “but no one ever touches them.” He smiled and laid his hand on the back of her neck again, but then pulled her up into a deep kiss, holding her to his chest. He had to pull away with a gasp to speak.   
“Scales or no… I love you. A night of confidence, and a week of yearning, but I love you. A pox on the circumstances.” She smiled, but then her face fell. Gesturing to the beeping machines, she again attempted to pull away.   
“Equius, this condition is unique. And life-threatening. Without all these treatments… I might not live to thirty. Loving me is only going to hurt you. I wouldn’t be able to come live with you and marry you. MY mother…” She looked down again, but his hand was there to hold her chin up. One soft kiss, then another, and he whispered that a short life of bliss had to be immeasurably better than a long imprisonment. Feferi teared up and buried her cheek into his hand, clutching the wrist in her fingers. He kissed her forehead and let her cry against him.  
Eventually her tears dried up and she rested weakly against the fuchsia pillows while Equius gently braided locks of her hair and coated every freckle on her round face in kisses. More kisses were pressed to the opalescent scales, until she shivered and made him stop. That was when he wrapped his arms around her and murmured again and again that he loved her.  
When the first shaft of dawn light broke over the young Peixes’s windowsill, Equius had gone, but with a letter in his stead.

“My love, Feferi,  
I fear your family waking to find a stranger lying with their daughter, but I leave this with contact information. Keep it safe. Even… if you come to the decision that you don’t wish to see me anymore, you can reach me at this number. I would do anything to protect you, but I would do everything to make you happy, if you wish. You are the starlight on night ocean waves, shimmering and luminescent. No flower on this earth can compare to the petal softness of your touch in anything you do. You are the epitome of selfless beauty and I am not sure you even realize it.  
Scales or no, I will always love you.  
My Goldfish Princess,  
Equius Zahhak.”

 

His Goldfish Princess didn’t answer for three days. Three days spent in silent agony, begging for her to call, to text, to throw a rock with a note tied to it. Anything but this silence. Once he even paced around the perimeter of the grounds, wringing his fingers hard enough to leave bruises, but she still didn’t call. His heart was again not too strong to break.  
Then, so late at night he nearly missed it, his phone buzzed atop the nightstand as he prepared for sleep. The mechanic’s eyes flew open and he sat up to reach for the phone. Though blurry without glasses, the message was all too clear.  
“I want you to call me Goldfish Princess for the rest of my life.” Equius’s heart flew to his throat. She’d accepted. She would flee with him. She would lay her life alongside his and forsake the oppressors she had once called family. She would risk her life for the happiness he offered. His fingers shakily answered her text.  
“I love you, my Goldfish Princess.” His eyes closed, then opened at another chime.  
“I love you too.” He wasn’t aware that he’d stopped breathing, but now he sucked in a breath and covered his face with one hand. His shoulders shook as he shuddered out a few tears of happiness, and then he was himself.  
“When should I collect you?”  
The next text was immediate.  
“I’m in the park.” He was up in a flash, throwing on a coat and rushing out to meet her, taking a taxi to the edge and running. He could just see her silhouette on the slide. He just needed to reach her.  
They met in a flurry of movement, wrapping her into his arms, and his hands found hers and he kissed the marks left by her lifesaving cruelty. His mind never faltered once, and her smile only widened as he pressed her skin to his lips. She’d already packed a bag, which he collected, and together they stole away into the night, never to be seen in this city again.


	4. Serene

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it, folks. The end. This is it.

Equius Zahhak trudged slowly up the hill, one arm looped around the handles of a wicker picnic basket, the other around his wife. A child whooped and airplaned past, racing the pair to the top where a shade tree waited. Long waving hair billowed past the child’s shoulders, and she turned and waved to her father, who raised a hand with a small smile and hurried along. A kiss was pressed to his wife’s forehead before sitting carefully on the grass, Feferi at his side. The daughter came in with her mother’s bubbling eyes and a beaming freckled smile, but settled into his lap and cuddled into him. Equius wrapped his arms around the girl and kissed her hair, jet black like his and even longer.   
His eyes closed as he listened to her babble, arms secure around her soft but lanky frame. She stole a sandwich from the wicker basket and jammed it into his mouth, pulling a laugh from her father until he in turn shoved food into her face. She squealed and ate messily, cuddling into him as she looked up at the setting sun.  
“Do you see that one? Those stars? Can you count them?” The little girl chirped in his arms. One, two, three… “Those are Pisces. Your mother’s stars.” Feferi and Equius’s daughter grinned.   
“Mommy has special stars?”  
“All of us have special stars. But those are Mommy’s, yes.” He kissed her cheek and held her close. He was expecting her next question.  
“Was Mommy really a princess?”  
“She was mine, and that was royalty enough.” His eyes closed again, heavy, but then he smiled and reached to gently touch Feferi’s face, framed in pink. Framed in fuchsia vinyl, her smile was eternal, unwavered by hardship or death. His daughter picked up the picture and held it in her lap, chirping softly at her mother with a grin. Though it seemed she was speaking more to the stars than to the picture frame.  
Equius sighed and lifted his face to the sky. Rivers and oceans of light washed over his face as if to stroke his cheek and draw away every bit of tension and sadness within him. Everything seemed to wash away in the tide, a night just like that night, but with all the memories. The hard times and the wonderful, elation and devastation. Equius would not trade a single of those moments for the path they hadn’t taken together, the path where she lived. She’d cast her lot with his and together they had used it to make the best. And their best was better than many dream of.   
His fingers began to stroke his daughter’s mass of hair, just as she was beginning to fall asleep.   
“My Goldfish Princesses,” he breathed, and his hand brushed gently against the edge of a line of iridescent scales laying at the back of her neck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's short, I know, but it was supposed to be. Short and sweet and impulsive. I hope you enjoyed it.


End file.
